This Property is Condemned (1966) [NR] ****

A film review by Glenn Erickson for dvdtalk.com.

Adapted from one of his less well-known plays, This Property is Condemned should have been titled Tennessee Williams' Greatest Hits. It's all there, the depression setting with crude men circling like dixie moths around an oversexed child-woman undergoing the spiritual crisis of losing her dignity to 'the kindness of strangers.'

In glorious Technicolor and shaped as a star vehicle for the ultra-glamorous Natalie Wood, the basically trashy little story is bent all out of shape. Interesting casting makes it fun to watch and it stands as a good example of Hollywood trying to push the limits of the production code, but overall the film fails - we've seen it all before, and the fancy trimmings just make it look more fake than it is.

Railroad agent Owen Legate (Robert Redford) comes to the small town of Dodson Mississippi to lay off most of its railroad employees, many of whom live and carouse at the boarding house of Hazel Starr (Kate Reid). Owen grows fond of Hazel's younger daughter Willie (Mary Badham) but falls in love with her older sister Alva (Natalie Wood) a vivacious beauty. But the wicked Hazel exploits Alva for the men she attracts, and Alva's already on the way to being considered a loose woman - at age seventeen.

Depression Mississippi never looked so good. James Wong Howe's color is breathtaking and the grimy depression folk look like glamorous movie stars, well, at least when they're impersonated by Natalie Wood and Robert Redford. Paramount's art department makes sure that every period detail smack us right on the nose, even though hairstyles and costumes go to pot as soon as Alva Starr hits the streets of New Orleans. 

The familiar story and the overall Hollywood glitz are what do in This Property is Condemned, not the acting. Alva Starr needs to be a ravishing young thing like Natalie Wood to raise all the excitement the story demands. If only her makeup and hairstyles were keyed to the story instead of the requirements of her star image.

Robert Redford had about the slowest and least exciting career arcs of any young 60s actor. In both this film and the same year's commercially disastrous The Chase he comes in for some physical punishment. Yet he's still an inexpressive pretty face - whenever he reacts in dumb shock to some real or imagined offense by Alva, we have to wait for his next dialogue to find out how he really feels. Redford only came into his own in later pictures like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where he was permitted to be funny too.

Even the greasy grotesques that surround Redford are Hollywood off-the-shelf types. Charles Bronson is good, but his role as a crude working man uses his physical type in the same way he was shoehorned as an Indian a decade before. Robert Blake is an unappealing crybaby. The fat cat who just wants 'a few weeks of Alva's kindness' is the anonymous-looking but shuddersome John Harding, and is much more successful for being an unfamiliar face.

The best thing in the picture is Kate Reid as Hazel, Alva's manipulative mother who literally tries to prostitute her own daughter. It's an extreme character and it takes a talent like Reid to make it work; once again it's the actress's unfamiliarity that allows us to believe in her.

The production bends over backwards to make everything pretty. The locations may be authentic but the atmosphere is not. In his second film, director Sydney Pollack might not have carried the weight to wrest the film from powerful Paramount craft departments, or perhaps this is producer Ray Stark's idea of how to make a movie. Co-producer John Houseman is associated with great films, many of them commercial failures, but there's little of his dark literary undercurrents on display here.

What we have is a big dose of Hollywood gloss. The effort to be daring within the limits of the production code makes every peek-a-boo glimpse of Natalie's body seem forced and silly. There's a chaste skinny-dipping scene and chaste opportunities for Natalie to get nude for dialogues with Reid and Redford. By the time Redford charges into her shower, it's just ridiculous. The movie is too glamorous and Wood too regal a star to profit from naturalistic touches like partial nudity which only emphasizes what the film cannot show rather than what it could show. Hollywood directors demanded the freedom to have adult material in films, and the MPAA finally gave them Valenti and the ratings system.

This Property is Condemned is a casualty of the transition period when tame racy pictures carried the disclaimer Intended for Mature Audiences. The odd thing is that Ms. Wood wouldn't have done nude scenes anyway. One of the last of the real studio-grown stars, she was no exhibitionist and didn't need the exposure to get attention. Interestingly, after a couple of more films and reasonable success with the dated Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, she stopped showing up on theater screens.

This Property is Condemned is also noted for Francis Ford Coppola's leap into studio writing. He went right from Roger Corman's stable of talent to script doctoring for pictures like this one, and discerning his input isn't easy. Something's off in this picture, for just when it looks like it's over, with a pullback helicopter shot and everything, the locale changes to the big city and the story lumbers on for another twenty minutes of false conclusions. We don't want to see Alva become a prostitute, or Charles Bronson come busting back in for revenge and kill somebody. Even though neither of those things happen, what does happen isn't very satisfying.

Nobody should take credit for the awkward framing device with little sister Mary Badham walking the railroad tracks wearing Natalie's dress and singing her old song. She isn't half as convincing as she was in To Kill a Mockingbird and the construction is an obvious bore: See that old house ... it all happened right there. If This Property is Condemned was more or less ignored by audiences, it was because they'd seen it all before.

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Paramount's DVD of This Property is Condemned has nothing to be ashamed of - the DVD looks great and sports colors that pop like real Technicolor. James Wong Howe's showoff images, such as the beautiful shot of Alva blowing out her birthday candles, will certainly please Natalie Wood's fans. The Audio is as solid as the picture. There are no extras.

Labels: drama, Robert Redford, romance, tragedy
IMDb 70/100
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=62, viewers=76)
Blu-ray
Original Glenn Erickson review

 

My Oxford Year (2025) [PG-13] ***

 An edited film review by Courtney Howard for Variety on Aug. 1, 2025.

My Oxford Year review: Sofia Carson learns lessons of the heart in Netflix's disheartening weepie

While studying at Oxford, an ambitious American has her pursuits upended after meeting a charming British cad in a mediocre offering that often defies logic in favor of contrived poignancy.

Seconds after the opening credits of My Oxford Year have discreetly scrolled across the screen, our happy heroine strolls the streets surrounding the titular British institution and is haphazardly doused by a massive puddle thanks to a classic 1960s-era Jaguar E-Type driven by her soon-to-be paramour. This klutzy comedic moment endemic to the rom-com genre unfortunately doubles as a fitting metaphor for the viewing audience, as the ensuing shenanigans make us feel pelted by that same gutter water time and time again. What should be a tender, feminist-minded story centered on a young woman rediscovering her dormant childhood dreamer turns into a middling melodrama about being with a cute guy in desperate need of her rescue.

Anna de la Vega (Sofia Carson) has been fantasizing about attending Oxford University since she was 10 years old, cracking open a dusty old book of poetry for the first time. Even before her face appears on camera and the narration reiterates what’s already been shown, it’s clear that this Type A personality has built her entire world around this milestone adventure (reinforced by meticulously curated context clues, which include dog-eared copies of Austen, Fitzgerald and Brontë’s works, as well as a diploma from Cornell and other framed honors). Anna’s plan is to defer her post-graduate financial analyst gig at Goldman Sachs for a year to study Victorian poetry under the tutelage of her personal hero Professor Styan (Barunka O’Shaughnessy) and then return to the States to make her mom (Romina Cocca) and dad (Yadier Fernández) proud by getting a job in finance.

However, Anna’s plans are quickly dashed upon meeting hunky, wealthy local playboy Jamie Davenport (Corey Mylchreest). Their chance, embarrassingly adorable meet-cute in a fish-and-chips shop leads to fate pushing them together again in the classroom when Jamie takes over teaching duties on the first day. Flirtatious hijinks ensue, such as singing pub karaoke, eating at a kebab food truck and playing unhealthy jealousy games involving leggy redhead Cecelia Knowles (Poppy Gilbert) and oblivious dweeb Ridley (Hugh Coles). They inevitably give in to their lustful feelings. But when the pair begin to realize their casual love affair is far more meaningful than a fling, complications and hard, hidden truths bubble to the surface that affect both of their futures.

The execution by director Iain Morris (The Inbetweeners) and writers Allison Burnett and Melissa Osborne (adapting Julia Whelan’s novel) is subpar, both in their character construction and narrative twists and turns. Unless it’s blatantly stated, we rarely get the sense Anna values practicality and financial success over indulging her romantic whimsy. All we see is her swooning over sentimentality. It’s not far-fetched to wonder how she compartmentalizes pragmatism and passion, allowing her ambitious drive to take a back seat to love. The filmmakers had ample opportunity to establish and better integrate Anna’s inner push-pull as a first-generation American daughter of immigrants, searching for a balance between her heart’s desires and her parents’ wishes for success, yet they falter. Instead, they handwave that aspect.

Rather than exploring Anna’s complex conundrums after she acclimates to her new digs (with lame fish-out-of-water gags galore) and starts sleeping with Jamie, they allow his conflicts to take over the film, eclipsing her struggles and dwarfing her significance in her quest. His familial strife dealing with his disapproving father William (Dougray Scott) and denial-riddled mother Antonia (Catherine McCormack) is given priority around the midpoint and doesn’t let up until the finale. There’s a predictable outcome as well, made worse by contrivances where circumstances are problems until they’re magically not, lacking satisfying emotional resolution. Anna puts herself in a subordinate role as a tool used to mend Jamie’s family’s fissures, allowing him to experience a greater arc than her own.

While its story holds much to be desired, the film’s technical craftsmanship earns higher marks. Pacing picks up in tangible energy and vibrancy within editors Victoria Boydell and Kristina Hetherington’s montages. The upbeat effervescence of Anna and Jamie’s trysts are endearingly bubbly in their hands. With its punch of Isabella Summers’ swelling, swirling score and a flurry of sharp cuts, toggling between fantasy and reality, their final montage’s end note is surprisingly effective, radiating beyond the end credits. Cinematographer Remi Adefarasin’s diffuse lighting during enchanting sequences brings a soft warmth, though the film’s overall flat, shallow focus is made a glaring issue at the start when clips from Oxford Blues play, emphasizing how cinematic films looked in the 1980s compared to the current digital era.

A love story only works if audiences care about the couple, and despite the aforementioned shortcomings, Carson and Mylchreest elevate the material. They have great chemistry together, conducting heat and sparks for necessary rootable interest. Both deliver genuinely open-hearted performances. As seen mere months ago in her previous Netflix romantic-dramedy The Life List, Carson is adept at making sarcasm and sorrow resonate, finding nuance and strength in vulnerability. When it comes to the supporting players, Harry Trevaldwyn is a true highlight as Anna’s gay neighbor/ classmate Charlie Butler. His attention-grabbing performance recalls Rhys Ifans in Notting Hill, stealing the show as the comedic relief best exemplified in a scene where he goes on a riff about his elaborate vision of his death.

Everything that Me Before You (2016, Emilia Clarke, Sam Claflin) does right, My Oxford Year manages to do wrong, from its heroine’s journey toward enlightenment to basic fundamentals dealing with character motivations. Our hopes for a thoughtful rumination on the messy bits of life making up the best parts of us deflates into a mess as the filmmakers continually forget their female protagonist should remain at the center of its universe. [Howard's rating: 2 stars out of 5 = 40%]

Labels: college, comedy, drama, romance, tragedy
IMDb 59/100 
MetaScore (critics=39, viewers=51) 
RottenTomatoes (critics=30, viewers=52) 
Courtney Howard's review

The Great Waldo Pepper (1975) [PG] ****

A film review by Roger Ebert on January 1, 1975

Waldo Pepper is, as he admits with a shy smile, the second greatest flier in the world. The greatest is Ernst Kessler, the German ace who shot down 70 foes in World War I. But that was more than a decade ago, and now Kessler, as much as Pepper, is reduced to peddling $5 plane rides and doing stunt flying during the last years of barnstorming. The pay isn’t good, but the work is lousy: I’m not selling good flying, explains the proprietor of Dillhoefer’s Air Circus. I’m selling sudden death.

Even so, the air circus at times finds itself performing before groups of half a dozen agape schoolboys. The days when pilots could land on Main Street are over; the airlines and the air mail are established; the government wants to regulate flying and give it an image of greater safety. The world is closing in on Waldo Pepper. And, as played by Robert Redford, he hardly knows it: He’s a simple, brave, boyish soul who is loyal to his friends and who dreams of being the first man to perform the dangerous outside loop.

The Great Waldo Pepper is a film of charm and excitement, a sort of bittersweet farewell to a time when a man with an airplane could make a living taking the citizens of Nebraska on their first five minute flights. It doesn’t have any big notions about the passing of that era, or of the barnstormers, who are seen as overgrown kids with wonderful toys that fly. But it has a good feeling for the period, and director George Roy Hill gives us poignancy and adventure.

The adventures are especially spectacular. Hill doesn’t cheat in the stuntflying sequences, which include unfaked footage of a biplane flying down a village street with a few feet of clearance and a petrified heroine clinging to one wing. This stunt sets up the trickiest scene in the film, when the heroine (Susan Saradon) freezes with fright and the great Waldo flies up in another airplane, climbs out on a wing, transfers to the first plane, walks out to the girl and attempts to pull her to safety.

If Waldo were able to do that five days a week, he might be able to earn a living. For the time has passed, alas, when the good citizens of Nebraska will pay to see ordinary stunts. As a plane flies past the stands with Waldo standing on the wing, a member of the audience observes: “Fellow came through here last week doing that standing on his head. Waldo’s best hope is that his friend and designer, Ezra Stiles (Edward Herrmann), will be able to perfect a monoplane with strong enough wings to do the outside loop. And alarming rumors float westward that the legendary Kessler (Bo Brundin) also hopes to be the first with that trick.

Kessler is successful, after developments I’d better not give away, but then both Kessler and Pepper find themselves in Hollywood doing stunt flying for a living. Kessler’s heroics in a famous World War I dogfight (which have deeply impressed Waldo) are now just the stuff for a potboiler movie, with Kessler flying his own stunts but a fatuous young actor playing him. And then Kessler and Pepper square off in the skies for a recreation of that famous battle, and somehow it becomes real…. [Ebert's rating: 3 stars out of 4]

Blogger's comment: This is a terribly underappreciated film, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Discerning viewers will note Redford's brief arcade baseball throwing scene nine years before he does it in The Natural (1984), and, of course, his flying, ten years before Out of Africa (1985).

Labels: action, adventure, drama, Robert Redford
IMDb 67/100 
MetaScore (critics=60, viewers=tbd) 
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=62, viewers=70) 
Blu-ray 

Laura (1944) *****

A film review by Roger Ebert on January 20, 2002.

I’ve seen Otto Preminger‘s Laura three or four times, but the identity of the murderer doesn’t spring quickly to mind. That’s not because the guilty person is forgettable but because the identity is so arbitrary: It is not necessary that the murderer be the murderer. Three or four other characters would have done as well, and indeed if it were not for Walter Winchell we would have another ending altogether. More about that later.

Film noir is known for its convoluted plots and arbitrary twists, but even in a genre that gave us The Maltese Falcon, this takes some kind of prize. Laura (1944) has a detective who never goes to the station [and drinks while he is on duty]; a suspect who is invited to tag along as other suspects are interrogated; a heroine who is dead for most of the film; a man insanely jealous of a woman even though he never for a moment seems heterosexual; a romantic lead who is a dull-witted Kentucky bumpkin moving in Manhattan penthouse society, and a murder weapon that is returned to its hiding place by the cop, who will come by for it in the morning. The only nude scene involves the jealous man and the cop.

That Laura continues to weave a spell — and it does — is a tribute to style over sanity. No doubt the famous musical theme by David Raksin has something to do with it: The music lends a haunted, nostalgic, regretful cast to everything it plays under, and it plays under a lot. There is also Clifton Webb’s narration, measured, precise, a little mad: I shall never forget the weekend Laura died. A silver sun burned through the sky like a huge magnifying glass. It was the hottest Sunday in my recollection. I felt as if I were the only human being left in New York. For Laura’s horrible death, I was alone. I, Waldo Lydecker, was the only one who really knew her.

It is Clifton Webb’s performance as Waldo Lydecker that stands at the heart of the film, with Vincent Price, as Laura’s fiancee Shelby Carpenter, nibbling at the edges like an eager spaniel. Both actors, and Judith Anderson as a neurotic friend, create characters who have no reality except their own, which is good enough for them. The hero and heroine, on the other hand, are cardboard. Gene Tierney, as Laura, is gorgeous, has perfect features, looks great in the stills, but never seems emotionally involved; her work in Leave Her to Heaven (1945) is stronger, deeper, more convincing. Dana Andrews, as Detective Mark McPherson, stands straight, chain-smokes, speaks in a monotone, and reminded the studio head Daryl F. Zanuck of an agreeable schoolboy. As actors, Tierney and Andrews basically play eyewitnesses to scene-stealing by Webb and Price.

This was Clifton Webb’s first big starring role and his first movie role of any kind since 1930. He was a stage actor who refused the studio’s demand for a screen test; Otto Preminger, who began by producing the film and ended by directing it, in desperation filmed Webb on a Broadway stage and showed that to Zanuck. He doesn’t walk, he flies, an underling told Zanuck, but Webb, who had a mannered camp style, impressed Zanuck and got the role. Vincent Price creates an accent somewhere between Kentucky and Transylvania for his character, who is tall and healthy and inspires Waldo Lydecker to complain to Laura: With you, a lean strong body is the measure of a man.

Lydecker is lean but not strong. Webb was 55 when he played the role, Tierney 24. A similar age difference was no problem for Bogart and Bacall, but between Webb and Tierney it must be said there is not the slightest suggestion of chemistry. He is a bachelor critic and columnist (said to be modeled after Alexander Wolcott), and the first time we see him he is sitting in his bathtub, typing. This is after Laura’s body has been found murdered with shotgun blasts, and the detective comes to question her closest friend.

The scene develops with more undercurrents than surface, as McPherson enters the bathroom, glances at Lydecker, seems faintly amused. Then Lydecker swings the typewriter shelf away, so that it shields his nudity from the camera but not from the detective. Waldo stands up, off screen, and a reaction shot shows McPherson glancing down as Lydecker asks him to pass a bathrobe. Every time I see the movie, I wonder what Preminger is trying to accomplish with this scene. There is no suggestion that Lydecker is attracted to McPherson, and yet it seems odd to greet a police detective in the nude.

Lydecker is Laura’s Svengali. In flashbacks, we follow the progress of their relationship. He snubs her in the Algonquin dining room, then apologizes, becomes her friend, and takes over her life, chooses her clothes, redoes her hair, introduces her to the right people, promotes her in his column. They spend every night together out on the town, except Tuesdays and Fridays, when Waldo cooks for her at home. Then other men enter the picture, and leave again as Waldo blasts them in his column. Big, dumb Shelby with his lean, strong body is the latest and most serious threat. Considering this Waldo-Shelby-Laura love triangle, it occurs to me that the only way to make it psychologically sound would be to change Laura into a boy.

The movie basically consists of well-dressed rich people standing in luxury flats and talking to a cop. The passion is unevenly distributed. Shelby and Laura never seem to have much heat between them. Waldo is possessive of Laura, but never touches her. Ann Treadwell (Anderson), a society dame, lusts for Shelby but has to tell him or he’d never know. And Detective McPherson develops a crush on the dead woman. There is an extraordinary scene where he enters her apartment at night, looks through her letters, touches her dresses, sniffs her perfume, pours himself a drink from her bottle and sits down beneath her enormous portrait, which is placed immodestly above her own fireplace. It’s like a date with a ghost.

McPherson’s investigation and his ultimate revelations are handled in an offhand way, for a 1940s crime picture. He is forever leading people to believe they’re going to be charged, and then backing off. Lydecker asks to tag along as the cop interviews suspects; murder is his favorite crime, and I like to study their reactions. Astonishingly, McPherson lets him. This is useful from a screenplay point of view, since otherwise McPherson would be mostly alone.

All of these absurdities and improbabilities somehow do not diminish the film’s appeal. They may even add to it. Some of the lines have become unintentionally funny, James Naremore writes in More than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts,Where ‘Laura’ is concerned, the camp effect is at least partly intended – any movie that puts Clifton Webb, Judith Anderson and Vincent Price in the same drawing room is inviting a mood of fey theatricality [a flamboyant, affected, and sometimes deliberately campy style of performance].

The story of Preminger’s struggle to get the movie made has become Hollywood legend. As he tells it in his autobiography, Zanuck saw him as a producer, not a director, and assigned Rouben Mamoulian to the piece. When the early rushes were a disaster, Preminger stepped in, reshot many scenes, replaced the sets, and fought for the screenplay. Zanuck insisted that another ending be shot; the film was screened for Zanuck and his pal Walter Winchell, a real gossip columnist, who said he didn’t understand the ending. So Zanuck let Preminger have his ending back, and while the business involving the shotgun in the antique clock may be somewhat labored, the whole film is of a piece: contrived, artificial, mannered, and yet achieving a kind of perfection in its balance between low motives and high style. What makes the movie great, perhaps, is the casting. The materials of a B-grade crime potboiler are redeemed by Waldo Lydecker, walking through every scene as if afraid to step in something. [Ebert's rating: 4 out of 4 stars]

Labels: crime, drama, film-noir, mystery
IMDb 79/100 
RottenTomatoes (critics=100, viewers=84) 
Blu-ray 
Roger Ebert's original review